Broken Promises:
The City’s Replacement Park Scheme For
The New Yankee Stadium Project
"Parks - Are we losing important green space including parks and playgrounds? NO. The new stadium project will actually create more acres of parkland than currently exist including a new six-acre park on the Harlem River, a track, tennis courts, racquetball courts, basketball courts, a soccer field and an ice skating rink."
Excerpt from a mailer paid for by the New York Yankees community relations department and sent to neighborhood residents in the Bronx during the "public review" period of the Yankee Stadium ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) application to construct the new Yankee Stadium on public parkland.
INTRODUCTION
In June 2005, without a single public hearing and over the course of just eight days, City and State elected officials alienated 25.3 acres of historic South Bronx parkland to allow the New York Yankees to build a new stadium. As part of this action, the Bloomberg and Pataki administrations and the Yankees organization repeatedly promised the community that not only would the parks be replaced but even more parkland would be provided in return. However, a close examination reveals that just 21.78 of the 25.3 acres are actually being replaced, resulting in a net loss of nearly 4 acres. Whenever this deficiently has been exposed, the City's Department of Parks and Recreation has constantly altered the numbers to create a false impression. Of the replacement park acreage the city now claims, 58% (12.5 acres) already existed as either mapped parkland or, in one case, as a school yard. Also lost is the long promised dedicated funding desperately needed to maintain the replacement parks. And that's only the beginning of the broken promises.
Various State and Federal laws pertaining to the alienation and conversion of municipal parkland to non-park uses require that new parkland acting as a replacement must be of equivalent or greater value. For a variety of reasons, the local community has long argued that the replacement parks fail to meet the criteria, and that they fail to provide a similar level of usefulness or location. The city has attempted to pass off a disparate collection of parcels as "replacements," including building replacement parkland on top of existing parkland. Many of these concerns can be summarized as follows:
- The plan calls for replacing large linear parks that provided active recreation with smaller park features spread out in many areas and over wider distances – up to 1.4 miles away – some on top of parking garages.
- More than half of the replacement parkland the City is relying on to meet its obligation has existed as mapped parkland that the public has used for decades.
- Former park amenities such as a heavily used natural turf ballfield and an asphalt ballfield are not being replaced with similar active recreation facilities. In the case of the asphalt ballfield, the City has simply refused to acknowledge its recreational use.
- Parkland acreage previously used for active recreation is being replaced, in part, by a concrete pedestrian walkway. Some of the replacement acreage is also passive park acreage from other projects that were either promised under other park plans or previously unrelated to the stadium project.
- The replacement plan substitutes parkland that was free and open to the public with a significantly larger pay-to-play tennis concession – in a flood zone.
The replacement parkland plan also carries significant environmental and public health impacts. The project destroyed 70% of the community's mature trees, and aims to convert much of the previous parkland's natural features such as grass into artificial and impervious surfaces. The health benefits provided from the previous natural park features were numerous and critical to the well-being and safety of a community that suffers from the highest asthma rates in the country. As noted in the project's environmental impact statement (EIS), the health benefits from the replacement trees alone won't be realized for decades, if ever.
